Old court document suggests Cubs threw 1918 World Series to Red Sox

By DON BABWIN | Associated Press

Wednesday

Apr 20, 2011 at 12:01 AM

CHICAGO (AP) — If Chicago has been willing to believe that a cow caused the Great Chicago Fire, maybe it will buy this one: The White Sox got the idea to throw the 1919 World Series after the Cubs did the same thing one year earlier.

CHICAGO (AP) - If Chicago has been willing to believe that a cowcaused the Great Chicago Fire, maybe it will buy this one: TheWhite Sox got the idea to throw the 1919 World Series after theCubs did the same thing one year earlier.

That's the suggestion - more of a hint, really - from EddieCicotte, one of the infamous Black Sox banned from baseball aftertheir tainted World Series against Cincinnati.

In a 1920 court deposition the Chicago History Museum recentlyput on its website, Cicotte said "the boys on the club" talkedabout how a Cub or a number of Cubs were offered $10,000 to throwthe 1918 Series they lost 4-2 to the Boston Red Sox.

Cicotte is as vague as vague can be, failing to name any namesor provide any details about how the players might have done it oreven if he believes the Cubs threw the Series. But if what hesuggests is true it means that when it came to fixing ball games inthe early 20th century, Chicago was nobody's Second City.

"It is interesting to me as a Cubs fan and a historian ofChicago that both teams could be involved in back-to-back years,"said Peter Alter, an archivist at the museum who examined thedocument and other artifacts that the museum paid $100,000 for atauction.

If Cicotte's deposition lacks specifics, it does offer a glimpseinto the life of a player when their lives were a lot more like theworking stiffs who rooted for them than the wealthy owners theyplayed for.

Players commonly groused about being underpaid and there wasn'tanyone in the majors who didn't hear rumors about fixes. It wasimpossible not to see the gamblers at the games, the lobbies of thehotels where they stayed or in the taverns where they drank.

And they talked about such rumors all the time, including,Cicotte said, on a long train ride from Chicago to the EastCoast.

"The ball players were talking about somebody trying to fix theNational League ball players or something like that," Cicotte isquoted as saying in the deposition.

"Well anyway there was some talk about them offering $10,000 orsomething to throw the Cubs in the Boston Series," he said."Somebody made a crack about getting money, if we got into theSeries, to throw the Series."

Cicotte apparently likes the sound of $10,000 because that iswhat he said somebody left in his hotel room for his role in thefix of the 1919 Series. He died in 1969.

Whether any of this is true is unknown, but an author who wroteabout the 1918 Series after examining the deposition and othermaterial said not only was such a fix possible, it wasunderstandable.

"They didn't make much money," said Sean Deveney, a reporterwith The Sporting News whose book, "The Original Curse," said a fixby the Cubs was likely. "They had the incentive to do somethinglike that."

Both the Cubs and the Red Sox were upset that the teams' ownerswere not paying their fair share of the World Series receipts,Deveney said. Before one Series game in Boston, the two squadsrefused to come on the field until the owners paid them what theywere promised.

"The owners said no," Deveney said.

Deveney said the players quickly understood that they could notwin a public relations battle by refusing to play a game duringWorld War I, not in a ball park filled with soldiers. So theyplayed.

So did the Cubs throw the Series? No great hitter suddenlyforgot how to hit, and the Cubs pitchers were terrific, finishingthe Series with an astonishing 1.04 ERA.

Still, "there were definitely some suspicious plays," Deveneysaid, and most of them involved outfielder Max Flack.

In the fourth game, Flack was picked off not once, but twice.Flack turned a catchable fly ball in the sixth and final game intoan error that allowed two runs to score in the Red Sox's 2-1win.

And there was the time Babe Ruth came to the plate for the RedSox - a pitcher at the time, but emerging as one of the game's besthitters - and the Cubs' pitcher, Lefty Tyler, saw that Flack wasnot playing deep enough in right field.

"He waved him back and Flack just stood there," Deveney said."Sure enough, Babe hit one over his head" for a triple that scoredtwo runs.

Later in the game, Cubs pitcher Phil Douglas came in the gamelong enough to field a grounder and throw the ball over the firstbaseman's head, allowing the decisive run to score in the Red Sox's3-2 win.

A few years later, Douglas was banned from baseball for what thepapers called "treachery" after proposing that another team in thepennant race pay him to leave the team and "go fishing."

All six games in the 1918 Cubs-Red Sox Series were close -Boston never won a game by more than a run - and it would only takea dropped ball here or a badly thrown ball there to turn victoryinto defeat.

"It didn't take much to throw a game," Deveney said. "It reallydidn't."

If there is a record of a baseball official asking Cicotte asingle question about the 1918 World Series, Deveney doesn't knowabout it.

"Baseball didn't want to investigate," he said. "They wanted tomake it all about the Black Sox and say, 'OK, gambling'sgone.'"

And what if the Cubs - a team that hasn't won a World Series in103 years, blaming the curse of a goat and the glove of a fan namedSteve Bartman along the way - had actually back in 1918?

"It would have bumped the curse up a decade," joked Alter. "Wecould be looking at a century (without winning a World Series)seven years from now."

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